Daniela Witten has had a superb, if not entirely spontaneous, sabbatical experience. She explains:

Two years ago, I visited a dear friend who had recently, and with very little planning, uprooted her life in New York City—home, job, decades of friendships—to move with her husband and three young boys to a new country, just for the sake of adventure! My friend is spontaneous and fun. What a lucky pair of things to be!

And then a thought came to me: I am spontaneous and fun! Well, sort of. Maybe spontaneous isn’t quite the word: the first time I taught, I prepared my lectures a full quarter in advance, and I planned the timing of my pregnancies around my tenure clock (kid #1¹) and teaching schedule (kids #2 and #3). My PhD students might say fun doesn’t quite capture it, either. Maybe extremely hard-working and goal-oriented is more accurate. Suddenly the path ahead was clear: I would redirect my extreme hard work and laser focus toward a new goal: a magical year abroad with my family!

And I did it. The plan took nearly 18 months from inception to execution (did I mention I’m not spontaneous?). The only quick decision was where: a year in Italy, where my mother’s family lives and where I spent my childhood summers. I spent the next 17 months, 29 days, and 23.9 hours applying for a sabbatical, setting up a visiting appointment at Bocconi University, enrolling my kids in an international school, conducting 56,000 hours of internet research on Italian residency permits, brushing up on my Italian by reading all of Elena Ferrante in the original, giving my colleagues so much advance notice that some thought my sabbatical would start in Fall 2024 instead of 2025, finding an apartment in Milan, handing each family member one suitcase to pack as they saw fit, setting up an email auto-response that brimmed with borderline-unhinged (or possibly fully-unhinged) sabbatical energy², and loading us all onto a plane for a fun-filled year of spontaneous adventure!

And what a year it was. Our family of five gallivanted through Europe on no fewer than 23 overnight trips. We rode donkeys in Sicily, pressed our own olive oil in Umbria, skied the Sella Ronda in the Dolomites both clockwise and counterclockwise, and hunted truffles with a dog in Alba. In Milan, we caught an Inter/Milan game (if you know, you know), the Olympic women’s figure skating short program, and opening night at La Scala. I listened exclusively to Italian pop. My kids ate literally all of the gelato—as in, if you’re planning a trip to Italy, do not expect to find any, because they finished it. There were highs (my sixth-grader correcting my Italian grammar), lows (my 238th trip to the post office in pursuit of that residency permit), and everything in between (my first-grader learning all the curse words on his first day of school³). And there were moments we laughed til our bellies hurt—like when I booked an appointment at a salon called “Curletti,” certain they specialized in curly hair⁴, and when my fourth-grader, eyeing an overpriced menu, asked, “Who do they think they are, Switzerland?”

And there were the statisticians! I visited 16 departments across Europe and gave 17 talks, meeting colleagues I’d otherwise never have crossed paths with. (It’s a 14-hour flight from Seattle to Milan, which makes short research visits impractical in normal life; being a train ride from so much of Europe was an extraordinary gift.) I also honed my favorite party trick: corresponding with an Italian statistician entirely in English about a seminar visit, then surprising them in person with fluent—if American-accented—Italian. If you’re one of the many European statisticians I met this year, please know that getting to know you was a genuine highlight.

And perhaps most important, I experienced the rejuvenation that comes from a real break. I entered the year worn down by the perpetual sense of too much to do and not enough time, and discovered that without teaching, service, or journal editing⁵, the set of things I truly need to do is actually quite finite. I spent the first half of the year wrapping up papers, and the second generating new ideas with a creativity that can feel evasive at the breakneck pace of my normal life. Most of all, I reconnected with my love of research.

As this magical year of spontaneous adventure comes to a close, here’s what I learned. You can take the girl out of Seattle, but not Seattle out of the girl: even in the fashion capital of the world, I spent most of the year in workout clothes. From my warm and brilliant European colleagues, I learned about new areas of statistics, that you should never eat lunch in front of your computer, and that it is always a good time to get a coffee with a colleague. I learned that sometimes hard work is not enough: my husband still has not received his residency permit⁶. And I learned to be spontaneous—I’m optimistic my next sabbatical won’t take more than 14 to 16 months of planning, tops.

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1 See imstat.org/2023/03/31/written-by-witten-tenure-is-not-the-hardest-thing/

2 My auto-response was a half-page long, and the final line read: “If your message is important and I have not responded, please re-send it after September 16, 2026!” (When it went live, that date was 15 months away.)

3 Have you ever heard a six-year-old say, “Mommy, where are my $%&*ing socks?” It’s actually pretty cute. But, seriously, I need him to stop.

4 “Curletti” is in fact a very common surname in northern Italy. Oops.

5 By chance, my term as editor ended shortly after the start of my sabbatical. See also https://imstat.org/2025/07/16/written-by-witten-to-err-and-to-edit-err-is-human-part-1-of-2/ (and part 2, which is also linked from part 1)

6 Let’s not be overly dramatic!! He does have a visa, just not a residency permit. He is in the country legally… I think.